Luis Cruz: Welcome to “San Diego News Fix: The Backstory,” where we tackle important questions about journalism ethics and give you a behind-the-scenes look at our industry and our newsroom.

The San Diego Union-Tribune will be partnering again with the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego to recognize journalists in Baja California by holding the Baja Journalism Contest. Joining us today to talk about the importance of this contest are Union-Tribune en Español editorial director Lilia O’Hara; Rafael Fernández de Castro, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego; Union-Tribune managing editor Lora Cicalo; and we begin with editor and publisher Jeff Light.

Jeff Light: Thank you, Luis, and Rafael, I’m very glad to have you here. This Baja Journalism Contest dates to 2020 and is something that the Union-Tribune and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies worked on together with a couple of other partners, but I really think you were the driving force behind this journalism contest. To start, I just wanted to hear about your goals for the contest and why you have created this new journalism contest for Baja California.

Rafael Fernández de Castro: Thank you, Jeff. I’m very happy to be with you. We gave these awards in April 2020; it’s been a little over two years, but it seems like decades because it was the pandemic that stopped us from doing it the last two years. I’ll tell you, when I came here five years ago to direct the center, I had always been worried about Mexican media. We forget that Mexican media is very young. Mexican democracy is very young – it’s only been there for the last 22 years. It was the year 2000 when we really became a full democracy, with free elections, and we finally had Vicente Fox coming into the Mexican presidency, ending 72 years with the PRI in power. And within those 72 years, it was not good for media. There was systemic corruption of the media. There was not independent media in Mexico. We had a lot of cases in which independent outlets were basically destroyed by the federal government.

The idea of the contest is to make sure that we help to incentivize independent Mexican journalism and in-depth research. I feel – and I felt – very envious about these very good stories in The Washington Post, The San Diego Union-Tribune, very well-thought-out stories that sometimes take weeks to put together, and the Mexican journalists, they don’t have that luxury of time or resources. So, the idea of the award was to incentivize Mexican journalists to go for these great efforts and great reports, and to make sure that we recognize the in-depth efforts and the professionalism. The awards are all about trying to strengthen young Mexican journalists.

Jeff Light: Terrific. And I think this year, the contest has a special context, and your group has done a lot of work around the attacks on journalists in Mexico and the threats to journalism and democracy that that represents. How do you see that environment today for journalism in Mexico?

Rafael Fernández de Castro: It’s awful because, again, it’s attacking a very young industry. In the past, it was just the government basically corrupting independent media outlets. Now, sometimes it’s official violence, sometimes it is organized crime. The environment is terrible for journalists, and I believe this is something that has basically threatened Mexican democracy. We’ve just seen it a few weeks ago – the cities of Tijuana and Mexicali basically stopped by organized crime putting up a lot of obstacles – burning cars and buses, and we can see the strength of organized crime in Mexico. And, of course, they have made independent journalists a target of the crimes because (the journalists) denounce them.

I believe that is why the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies and the Union-Tribune put together these two webinars to try to explain how bad the violence is and what we can do to improve it, because this is basically taking out all of the oxygen for new and independent journalists. Without sound journalists in Mexico, Mexican democracy will not flourish. That’s what we have to bear in mind – that we badly need independent journalists in Mexico to have democracy flourish.

Jeff Light: Yes, and I believe it’s 15 journalists so far this year murdered in Mexico, two of them in Baja. But, of course, journalism is under threat in the United States as well – both through attacks on the credibility of journalists, attacks on the standing and legitimacy of journalists, which we’ve seen through the Trump years, and now, most recently, a murder of a journalist in Las Vegas, where a public official has been accused of murdering an investigative journalist over the stories that he was writing.

Lora Cicalo, if you could just give us the facts on that Las Vegas case and a little bit of the backdrop in the U.S.

Lora Cicalo: As you mentioned, Jeff German, who was an investigative reporter for The Las Vegas Review-Journal, was killed at his home and the Clark County public administrator has been charged with murder in that case. German had been reporting on the public administrator’s office and complaints about harassment, the public administrator being a bully, having an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate, etc. Robert Telles, the public administrator, lost in the primary election to one of his deputies who, after reports of what was going on in the office, decided to run against him in the primary.

There had been online threats – the public administrator had taken to Twitter and other social media to criticize the reporting – and the editors at the Las Vegas Review-Journal said they did not get the impression from the reporter that he was concerned about these threats. In fact, he said he had had much worse over the course of his career, reporting on the mob and other aspects of Las Vegas life. So, he did not seem all that concerned and, consequently, they weren’t either. But he did become the ninth reporter in the U.S. since 1992 to be killed for his work.

In 2018, we had the situation in the newsroom at the Capitol Gazette in Annapolis, where a gunman – who had made threats against the paper and against its reporters – came into the newsroom and killed five people. And I think it goes hand in hand with other kinds of attacks on journalists in the United States – on their credibility. There’s been a significant increase in online harassment and threats against reporters and journalists in the United States and, obviously, that’s a concern as we do our work, and it points to the dangers of that work.

Jeff Light: Yes, a very important topic. Turning a bit to Lilia O’Hara. You were a judge in the first Baja Journalism Contest that we held in 2020, in part due to your standing as somebody with experience as a journalist on both sides of the border. So, in closing here, I wanted to get a little perspective – since we’re talking about a Baja journalism contest – on what are the differences in the life and work of a journalist in Baja versus what we might be accustomed to here on the U.S. side?

Lilia O’Hara: Yes, being a journalist in Baja – in Mexico – takes a lot of courage and love and passion for what you do, because the salaries are a lot lower in comparison. Sometimes here we think that the salary for a reporter might be low, but in Mexico it is even lower, sometimes to ridiculous levels. But people are really committed to do the job, and somebody who becomes a journalist is really somebody who wants to bring the truth, and working in the system now, as Rafael mentioned, is a little better than it was 20 years, 30 years ago because they didn’t have options. You knew that you would have to do journalism between a system or being paid by the government. Now there are more options, there is more independent journalism. But there are still a lot of challenges.

The government – or even some companies – you call them and it’s not like here where they tell you, “I’ll call you in 15 minutes.” You know that those 15 minutes are going to be two hours, and it’s a way of saying, “I’m not going to talk to you.” Journalists really have to struggle within a system that doesn’t entirely value their work. The community, the government, the system doesn’t know or doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to appreciate the value of journalism in the way it is here – that you have to talk to power, that you have to expose what is working and what is not working, and light the path to a better life for everybody. When you say, “This is not working,” sometimes the idea is that the government will do the job better. That’s the hope. Baja journalists, I think, are people we have to admire, because even with insecurity, with the limited resources and low salaries, they keep doing it, and they keep doing it with great quality and great risk and a lot of time invested on the job.

Jeff Light: Well said. And with that, I will turn it back to you, Luis.

Luis Cruz: Thank you, Jeff, Lora and Lilia. And Rafael, thank you very much for your time. We’ll be announcing the details of the second Baja Journalism Contest soon. Please continue to check our website, sandiegouniontribune.com, for updates.

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